review article: jews and anti-semitism in early modern germany

Review Article: Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Modern GermanyGermania Judaica, Volume 3, Part 2: Ortschaftenartikel Mahrisch-Budwitz- Zwolle. by AryeMaimon; Mordechai Breuer; Yacov Guggenheim; Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden imHessischen Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, 1080-1650. by Friedrich Battenberg; Judisches Leben inNiedersachsen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. by Rotraud Ries; The Red Jews: Antisemitism inan Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600. by Andrew Colin Gow; In and out of the Ghetto: ...Review by: Stephen G. BurnettThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 1057-1064Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543908 .

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII/4 (1996)

Review Article Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Modern

Germany

Stephen G. Burnett University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Germania Judaica,Volume 3, Part 2: Ortschaftenartikel Mahrisch-Budwitz- Zwolle. Ed. Arye Maimon, Mordechai Breuer, and Yacov Guggenheim. Tibingen:J. C. B. Mohr, 1995. vi + 982 pp. DM 318,-.

Quellen zur Geschichte derJuden im Hessischen Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, 1080-1650. Ed. Friedrich Battenberg. Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in hessischen Archiven, no. 2. Wiesbaden: Kommission fur die Geschichte der Juden in Hessen, 1995. xviii + 636 pp. DM 49,-.

Judisches Leben in Niedersachsen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Rotraud Ries. Quellen und Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Geschichte Niedersach- sens in der Neuzeit, no. 13. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1994. 614 pp. DM 98,-.

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600. Andrew Colin Gow. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 55. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995. x + 420 pp. $128.50.

In and out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann. Pub- lications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1995. xx + 330 pp. $64.95.

JEWISH HISTORIAN JACOB KATZ has argued that German Jewish history holds a "unique fascination" in that it can be traced from the Middle Ages, when Jews lived as a people apart, through emancipation and the (often imperfect) integration of Jews into German society, to its destruction as a community under Nazi rule (Katz, in Hsia and Lehmann, 1). Since the Second World War, historians of German Jewry have naturally focused upon more recent history, seeking to understand the Shoah (Holocaust) and its immediate causes. Only in the last twenty years have a significant number of scholars begun to devote their attention to the Jews of medieval and early modern Germany. The renewed publication of the monumental Germa- nia Judaica project, the founding of the Hochschule fuirJudische Studien in Heidel- berg in 1979, and of research institutes in both Austria and Germany for the study of GermanJewish history during the mid-1980s were indications of growing inter- est within the German academic world in Jewish history. Most telling, however, was the growing number of publications devoted to the Jews and their role in

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1058 Sixteenth Centtury Jotrnal XXVII / 4 (1996)

medieval and early modern German history.The founding of the journalAschkenas: Zeitschrfitffir Geschichte uind Kulttur derJtuden in 1991 was a highly visible example of this.1 The new German Jewish historical community differs from the older one in that it consists of both Jews and non-Jews and is both international in scope and interdisciplinary in character. In this review we will consider five new works that illustrate the progress these scholars have made in interpreting the German Jewish past and the work which still remains to be done.

The publication of the third volume of GermaniaJtudaica (1987-1995) is a tes- tament to the remarkable life and work of Dr. Arye Maimon (1903-1988), born Herbert Fischer of Breslau.As a student he edited the article onWurzburg for Ger- maniaJtidaica, volume 1 (1934). He was able to escape from Nazi Germany before the war and lived in Central and South America until his immigration to Israel in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s, he contributed to the second volume of Ger- maniajJudaica (1968), and in 1969 he became editor of the third volume.Working mostly with German and Austrian contributors who systematically studied the archival records ofJewish life in medieval Germany, Maimon and his coworkers at Hebrew University not only edited GermaniaJudaica itself but also created a document collection in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem for the years 1350 to 1650 for the further volume of GermaniaJtidaica intended to cover the years 1520 to 1650 (Battenberg, viii).The cooperative effort of so many scholars which made possible both GermaniaJiudaica, volume 3, and the enormous archival collection of CAHJP has served to stimulate research of all kinds on late medieval and early modern German Jewish history, including several of the articles in In and Otut of the Ghetto and the books by Battenberg and Ries.

GermaniaJudaica, volume 3, is organized like its predecessor volumes accord- ing to the pattern of the Deutsche Stidtebuch series. It contains articles on over a thousand cities and towns in present-day Germany, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, Hungary, northern Italy, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia which were a part of the German Reich between 1350 and 1519 and had a record ofJewish presence. Each article contains a discussion of the name of the town in Hebrew, German, and its permutations in eastern European languages, its location, and a brief history of the town.The remainder of the article is divided into as many as eleven parts relat- ing specifically to Jewish life in the place. These headings include discussions of its Jewish settlement history (including the location ofJewish quarter and community buildings), population, economic activity and social structure, internal community organization, cultural achievementsJewish settlement policies of the authorities, Jewish taxes, obligations for town defense, legal jurisdiction and the courts, social and cultural relations between Jews and Christians (including attempts at conver- sion of the Jews), and the history of the Jewish community, including expulsions. The articles themselves are based upon thorough archival research as well as exist- ing published materials and can be quite extensive: the article on Worms is thirty-

1J. Friedrich Battenberg and Markus J. Wenninger, "Aschkenas: Zu Entstehung und Konzeption einer Zeitzchrift,"Aschkenas 1 (1991): 9-20.



Burnett /Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Germany 1059

seven pages long and contains 287 footnotes.While it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Germania Judaica, volume 3, as a reference tool and aid to future research, the work is not an exhaustive description of late-medieval German Jewish life. Germania Judaica, volume 3, parts 1 and 2, is concerned with Jewish residence in towns (at most 70 percent of the Jewish population) while at least 30 percent of Germany's Jews lived in townships, markets, and villages and were rather thinly spread throughout the countryside rather than concentrated in a few places. Ger- maniaJiudaica, volume 3, part 3, should help to redress the balance and shed more light upon the life of rural German Jewry (Toch, in Hsia and Lehmann, 81-84; Guggenheim, in Hsia and Lehmann, 125 n. 1).

Friedrich Battenberg's Quiellen zur Geschichte derJtiden im Hessishen Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, 1080-1650 is an excellent example of how the Germania Judaica project has encouraged the study of early modern German Jewish history. In 1981 Battenberg composed a guide to Judaica in the Darmstadt Staatsarchiv for records dating from 1275 to 16502 but since then has discovered more relevant Judaica records. Arye Maimon,Yacov Guggenheim, and other researchers associated with the GermaniaJudaica project uncovered still more material in other archives relat- ing to material present in the Darmstadt Staatsarchiv, copies of which are now part of the collection there. Professor Battenberg published these documents in sum- mary form together with extensive indexes of persons, places, and subjects.3

The records summarized in Battenberg's book focus upon the Rhineland and the area that today comprises Hesse, but they contain references to Jews from as far away as Erfurt and Lindau. Roughly half of the records date from the period before 1450; the other half are from the last two hundred years. Many of the records relate to the prince bishopric of Mainz and the towns under its jurisdiction while others concern the city of Worms and the various Hessian principalities. The records themselves cover a wide variety of topics from imperial ordinances concerning the Jews to the decrees of princes concerning annual rents, permission for residence, tolls, and jurisdiction, to extensive records of indebtedness to Jews. Following a rather generous definition of "Judaica-related" records, Battenberg included documents that contained incidental references to Jews, geographical references to parts of town Jewish quarters, as well as documents more narrowly concerned with Jewish affairs. These incidental references are valuable for locating long vanished Jewish community installations, such as the cemeteries of Mainz and Friedberg (nos. 1 1 15, 1204) and the Bingen synagogue (no. 1 124). Records of loans and residence permits indicate that not only Jewish men but also Jewish women (e.g., nos. 157-174 passim) were involved in business and could have the status of Schlitzjtlden. The collection also contains some of the most significant local and imperial legis- lation concerning the Jews, such as the terms of jurisdiction over the Jewish

2Friedrich BattenbergJudaica im Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, bd. 1: Urkunden, 1275-1650, Reperto- rien des Hessischen Staatsarchivs Darmstadt, nr. 13/1 (Darmstadt: Hessichen Staatsarchiv, 1981).

3Uta L6wenstein, ed. Quellen zur Geschichte derjuden im Hessischen Staatsarchiv Marburg, 1267- 1600, 3 vols. Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Hessischen Archiven (Wiesbaden: Kommission fur die Geschichte derJuden in Hessen, 1989).



1060 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII / 4 (1996)

communities ofWorms (no. 522) and Frankfurt am Main (no. 1073) and the imperial privileges of Charles V granted to German Jewry in 1530 and 1544 thanks to the diplomatic activity ofJosel of Rosheim (nos. 1220, 1260).

The collection also reflects the vicissitudes ofJewish life during the Reforma- tion and during the Thirty Years' War. Summaries of letters from Emperor Maxi- milian regarding Johannes Pfefferkorn's visit to Worms (nos. 1185, 1187), edicts from Landgraf Philipp of Hesse ordering the expulsion of the Jews from Hesse in 1524 and their readmission in 1539 under stricter terms of residence (nos. 1208, 1258) and the readmission of the Jews to Worms and Frankfurt am Main after the temporary expulsions of 1612 to 1616 (nos. 1687, 1689) reflect how Jews experi- enced the turmoil of the Reformation age.The loss statements ofJews at the hands of invading forces, Catholic and Protestant alike, throughout the Thirty Years'War (nos. 1716, 1736-1738, 1782, 1793, 1857-1858) suggest that while some Jews may have benefited from some aspects of the war, most notably the right to live in new locations and to supply the various warring armies, many suffered from its effects just as their Christian neighbors did.

This document collection, just like Germania Judaica, performs an important service for scholars seeking to understand medieval German Jewry, but it consti- tutes only part of the historical record. Jews rarely speak with their own voice within these documents. Battenberg's source collection by definition consists of official records which reflect how secular and ecclesiastical princes and the bureau- crats they employed regardedJews and sought to regulate their lives and livelihoods. The collection also provides mute evidence of how uneven record keeping could be in late medieval and early modern Europe. The Judaica records of Archbishop Adolf of Mainz (1375-1390), for example, comprise nearly a fifth of the book (Battenberg, 56-147) while his successors were not nearly so assiduous in recording their dealings with Jews. These considerations, however, concern only the limitations of the documents presented in this source collection, not the importance of the work itself. Since Hesse and the Rhineland were home to some of Germany's earliest medievalJewish communities and the various Hessian state archives contain ample attestation of the Jewish presence in Hesse, Battenberg's Qttellen ztir Geschichte derJuden im Hessichen Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, 1080-1650 will serve to stimulate research on the Jews of Hesse.

In addition to reference works and source collections, the past decade has also seen significant research in Jewish regional history. Rotraud Ries'Jiidisches Leben in Niedersachsen im 15. und 16.Jahrhundert relies upon official records, in the absence of independent Jewish testimony, to reconstruct Jewish life within the borders of the medieval duchy of Brunswick. By choosing the territory of present-day Lower Saxony, Ries was able to consider the Jewish experience within the prince bishopric of Hildesheim, the imperial city of Goslar, and the territorial cities of Han- nover, Gdttingen, and Braunschweig, as well as in towns within the countryside of the duchies of Braunschweig-Calenberg and Braunschweig-Wolfenbiittel. Quite apart from allowing Ries to use a discrete, relatively well preserved series ofJewish policy records, her choice of Lower Saxony enables her to examine a region which




functioned as a closely knit economic unit for all of its political diversity. The picture Ries paints ofJewish life within this region is a rather bleak one.

After the Black Death,Jews were readmitted to German cities as individuals rather than as a group, and the legal instruments governingJewish residency were always for a particular number of years rather than of indefinite duration. Ries argues that at the beginning of the fifteenth century, this expiration date was not regarded as an expiration date for residence permission but rather as an opportunity to renego- tiate the fee for residence. By the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,Jewish life had become more unsettled, and the Jews of Lower Saxony were frequently obliged to leave their place of residence to seek new homes. Ries' treatment of the legal terms of Jewish residence within the various political jurisdictions of Lower Saxony and how these laws and policies were applied to particularJewish communities is particularly insightful. Her discussion of these matters is informed by cur- rent discussions of confessionalization, civic resistance to the absolutist claims of territorial princes, and the possible significance of mercantilism as a motive for encouraging Jewish residence. Her explanation of how Luther's anti-Jewish writ- ings served to encourage civic resistance to Jewish residence in the territorial cities of Brunswick and Hannover is both careful and persuasive. In the final three chap- ters of her book, Ries analyzes the economic niche occupied by the Jews of Lower Saxony, their social status within the majority community, and internal Jewish community organization and relations.

Overall,Jfldisches Leben in Niedersachsen is a persuasively argued book. By examining the situation of Lower Saxon Jewry in a regional perspective, Ries' book provides valuable insights into the opportunities and limitations of early modern German Jewish life. Ries is conversant not only with the contents of the extant official records but also shrewdly analyzes them, informing the reader where she thinks that their testimony should be taken with a grain of salt or where the very paucity of records requires suspension of judgment. To clarify her discussion, Ries provides eleven maps and eighteen tables, which allows her to summarize a great deal of information and provides the reader with quick access to statistical data for comparative purposes. Ries is forthcoming about issues where her own conclusions should be regarded as tentative pending further study of related prob- lems. Further work in the economic history of early modern Lower Saxony, together with the taxation policies of the various princes who governed portions of it, is needed to place her discussion of the various fees and tolls Jews were required to pay, and the economic niche which they filled within the overall economy, in a significant context. The extent to which the situation of the Jews in Lower Saxony parallels that ofJews in other regions of Germany also awaits clari- fication through future research. By stepping into a research vacuum and producing a carefully argued and documented work of regional Jewish history, Ries has made a major contribution to early modern German Jewish history.

If anti-Semitic stereotypes tell us little or nothing about Jews, they often speak volumes about those who believe them.Andrew Gow's The RedJews addresses one facet of medieval German popular anti-Semitism: the identity of the "Red Jews"



1062 Sixteenth CenturyJotirnal XXVII / 4 (1996)

and the part that they would play in the final hours of the world immediately pre- ceding the last judgment. The "Red Jews" derive from a uniquely German learned and popular apocalyptic tradition combining the biblical traditions of Gog and Magog with the "ten lost tribes" of Israel and the legend of "unclean nations" in the east whom Alexander the Great imprisoned to protect civilization. By these accounts the "Red Jews" were a powerful nation of cannibals living in the bound- less east who would one day burst upon the west in a frightful invasion, threatening to destroy Christendom itself in the most grisly way possible. If one began with this premise of a race ofJewish cannibals to the east, it became plausible for medieval German Christians to believe that given half a chance, their Jewish neighbors might well be tempted to indulge in cannibalism, lending further credibility to ritual murder accusation. Popular theology thus served to feed preexisting hatreds and fears already present within the Christian majority, at least within Germany. Since Jews were accused of ritual murder in England, France, Spain, and Italy in the Middle Ages, however, the "Red Jews" legend cannot explain why Christians in those lands believed that this horrific libel was plausible.4 Gow carefully traces the "Red Jews" tradition from Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica (1169-1173) through both Latin and German sources to its demise as a functioning element within apocalyptic tradition in the early sixteenth century. He provides the original texts in a lengthy two-hundred-page appendix together with indexes of persons and places and an extensive bibliography.

Far from being an example of literary antiquarian study, Gow's work argues that the "Red Jews" legend provides access to an otherwise inaccessible strand of beliefs, fears, and superstitions of ordinary Germans through the analysis of popular vernacular literature. Popular literature, he contends, has not received the attention it deserves as a preserver of popular culture. By applying this background of a popular anti-Jewish mentality and its purported function within medieval German culture, Gow complements Hsia's Myth of Ritual Murder by providing yet another reason why ordinary Germans might find the notion that Jews were cannibalistic plausible. Gow argues that "anti-Semitism and apocalypticism are so inextricably intertwined in medieval Europe that they must be studied together if a coherent and accurate picture of both phenomena is to emerge" (Gow, 3). By tracing one facet of anti-Semitism apocalypticism, Gow has provided a model for further work on this strain of popular anti-Sermitism.

The final work in this survey, In and Otit of the Ghetto, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann, is in some ways the most ambitious work as well.The book consists of papers given at an academic conference held at the University of California-Los Angeles in May of 1991 that sought to assess the state of research on the situation of the Jews in late medieval and early modern Germany. The list of contributors mirrors the diversity ofJewish historical studies, including scholars from Israel, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. The book is

4R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder:Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 3.




divided into six parts:Jewish cultural identity, the social and economic structure of German Jewry, Jewish-Gentile contacts and relations in the pre-emancipation period, representations of German Jewry, patterns of authority and the limits of toleration, and finally, four perspectives on German-Jewish history. The first five sections consist of several papers each and are concluded by a "comment" paper which offers critique and theses for further consideration. Several of the "comment" papers were contributed by scholars whose primary research has not been in early modern Jewish history, such as Theodore K. Rabb, Carlo Ginzburg, and Thomas A. Brady, Jr., but whose insights help to place these presentations in a broader framework. The addresses given by Jacob Katz and Jonathan I. Israel, two of the most prominent living historians of early modern Jewry, provide perspective from within the field ofJewish history itself.

Appropriately, the conference papers address early modern German Jewish history both from "within"Jewish experience and from "outside," as the Christian majority perceived the Jews who lived within their niidst.The first three sections, for example, focus uponJews' attempts to "fit in" with the majority culture.When discussing Jewish cultural identity, Alfred Haverkamp discusses the "Jewish Quar- ters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages" and how their location reflected a variety of factors, including when the first Jewish settlers arrived, expulsions, and forced relocations. Christopher Daxelmifller, "Organizational Forms of Jewish Popular Culture," and Otto Ulbricht, "Criminality and Punishment of the Jews in the Early Modern Period," discuss how Jews as individuals and commumni- ties responded to the majority society whether through selective cultural adapta- tion or through distinctively Jewish forms of criminality. The second section, on the social and economic structure of German Jewry, contains papers by Michael Toch on "Aspects of Stratification of Early Modern German Jewry: Population History and the Village" and by StefiJersch-Wenzel on "Jewish Economic Activity in Early Modern Times" and is concluded by Gershom David Hundert's "Perspec- tives on Economy and Society: The Jews of the Polish Commonwealth-A Com- ment." The third section, Jewish-Gentile Contacts and Relations in the Pre- Emancipation Period, contains a variety of papers including Paul Wexler's provoc- ative "Languages in Contact: The Case of Rotwelsch and the Two 'Yiddishes,"' which argues on linguistic grounds that Yiddish was originally a Slavic language which became Germanic in its word stock, suggesting that Jews first entered Ger- many from the Balkans and the east.Yacov Guggenheim's "Meeting on the Road: Jews and Christians on the Margins of Society" and RobertJiitte's "Contacts at the Bedside: Jewish Physicians and Their Christian Patients" are both solid papers which use a mixture of printed and archival sources to illuminate their themes.The section concludes with a pithy commentary by Deborah Hertz.

The fourth and fifth sections represent how Germans perceived the Jews and sought to control their lives. In the fourth section, Representations of German Jewry, R. Po-chia Hsia's "The Usurious Jew: Economic Structure and Religious Representation in an anti-Semitic Discourse" and Miri Rubin's "Imagining the Jew: The Late Medieval Eucharistic Discourse" discuss themes which were highly



1064 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII / 4 (1996)

sensitive to late medieval Germans in both town and countryside and which often led not simply to hatred oftheJews but to rioting.The fifth section treats how various types of authorities within the Holy Roman Empire regarded their Jewish subjects. The panelists chosen for this section were particularly well qualified to speak on their themes, including Rotraud Ries on "German Territorial Princes and the Jews," J. Friedrich Battenberg, "Jews in Ecclesiastical Territories of the Holy Roman Empire," and Christopher Friedrichs, "Jews in the Imperial Cities:A Polit- ical Perspective." The sixth and final part of the book is more historiographical, containing comments by Jonathan Israel, Hartmut Lehmann, Richard Popkin, and Mack Walker.

In and Out of the Ghetto succeeds admirably as a Zwischenbilanz, a report on the state of research in GermanJewish history of the early modern period. Its contributors use a variety of methods in their attempt to reconstruct Jewish life and experience from the perspective of intellectual, social, and political history. The book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the topic and contains many sugges- tions for future research.The book's interdisciplinary character makes it particularly useful for integrating the Jewish experience into the overall history of early modern Germany. A part of the book's appeal is what Deborah Hertz termed the "conceptual optimism" of at least some of the panelists who sought to identify the "positive social and professional ties between Christians and Jews" in pre-Emanci- pation Germany (Hertz, in Hsia and Lehmann, 157).

In and Out of the Ghetto, and the four other books discussed in this essay, attest to the extraordinary energy and productivity of a new generation of historians of German Jewry. Using newly discovered source materials and employing new methodologies to mine previously known sources, these scholars have shed much new light upon the situation ofJews in early modern Europe.Their findings will doubtless enrich both future research and teaching on the experience of Jews in early modern Germany.Yet these books and essays also illustrate how far historical scholarship has yet to advance in order to understand the German Jewish past. While the larger Jewish communities in urban areas have received a measure of scholarly study, both Ries and Battenberg could only lament a corresponding lack of research on Jews living under the jurisdiction of territorial princes, whether in towns or in the countryside. The study of Jews living in rural areas is still in its infancy and requires much further study. Such basic issues as the economic role of the Jews within the various regions of Germany, the effect of the Reformation upon German Jewry as a whole, and the continuity ofJewish life within German territories cannot be satisfactorily addressed without further regional studies. Such research can proceed in the wake of Arye Maimon and the Germania Judaica research team and their prodigious efforts in surveying the extant records. Such future studies will shed light not only upon Jewish life in early modern Germany but also upon the majority society, its self-conception, hopes and fears.



review article: jews and anti-semitism in early modern germany

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